Looks really nice :)Did you model the flames shooting out or is this all the work of the blur shader you mentioned in your previous post?
--------------------------------------Pushing buttons since "86

This is all zero plugins, and added only Blur Studios' 'Electric' shader. It's a pretty nice shader actually.There are no individual models for flames. There's a single ring(for each size of eruption, small, medium, large) with the offsetting/animating electric shader, and that's it. Texture animation and perturbation settings were eventually found (along with phase settings) that arrived at a decent facsimile of solar eruptions.

About to post a close-up of the flare in 640x480.I'd like to do a whole thing....show the star, dive down through it to the core, see it begin to collapse, zoom back out, show the nova and the blast wave destroying a few planets, etc. Would take a while.

Here it is. Still thinking about the whole shmear I mentioned above....we'll see.